Deepest rail station coming to Badaling

A worker explains a diagram of the Badaling Station of the Jingzhang High-Speed Railway on Wednesday.[Zou Hong/China Daily]

High-speed line will be key part of infrastructure for 2022 Olympics

The Badaling section of the Great Wall will soon offer another unique attraction－the world's deepest and largest high-speed railway station.

It will be located along the 174-kilometer Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway, which is still under construction.

"The Badaling station will be located 102 meters below the surface, with an underground construction area of 36,000 square meters, equal to five standard soccer fields, making it the deepest and largest high-speed railway station in the world," Chen Bin, director in charge of construction for China Railway No 5 Engineering Group, said on Wednesday.

The underground station will have three floors, separate levels for arriving and departing passengers－similar to airports－and two escalators with vertical heights of 62 meters, the highest in the country, he added.

Expected to be finished by the end of 2019, the railway is considered a vital link between the three venue clusters for the 2022 Winter Olympics, which will be held in Beijing and in Zhangjiakou, Hebei province.

The railway will have 10 stations and two branch lines connecting Yanqing and Chongli, aiming to smooth the residential traffic and fuel local economic growth, said He Yi, head of the major project construction department of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Development.

The railway, with a designed maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour, will shorten the commute time between the Beijing North Station and the Olympics venues in Chongli of Zhangjiakou from the current three-plus hours to around 50 minutes, He said.

It is estimated that the 2022 Winter Olympics and the high-speed railway will boost the economy of Zhangjiakou by 10 percent annually, according to the commission.

"The railway will serve the capital as well, such as by easing traffic congestion in the northern part, because that section of rail will go underground," He said.

Of the 10 stations, the Badaling Station is considered the most challenging because of the mountainous landscape, vulnerable environment and limited construction period, which requires the project to be finished within 46 months.

"It will run through mountains where the Great Wall is winding, so we adopted some of the world's advanced explosion technologies to guarantee it would not affect the Great Wall," said Luo Duhao, chief engineer of the railway group for the Badaling section.

"We have to keep the high quality of the construction as a priority, so we can build another project to match the old railway in the region and make us proud," he said.

Qinglongqiao station, near the Badaling Great Wall, has been a station on the country's first self-designed and constructed railway since 1904, and still serves passengers.